A UK mother forced her daughter to become pregnant so she could have a fourth child. Image: Shutterstock |
The woman was denied a request to adopt a fourth child,
however. So she turned to her then thirteen-year-old daughter, asking her to
become pregnant so she could have one more baby girl. The daughter told
investigators she was “shocked, pretty shocked” when her mother asked her to
become pregnant. She thought, “if I do this… maybe she will love me more.”
The daughter, “A,” was thirteen when her mother began having
her artificially inseminate herself using syringes of semen and douches prepared
for her. She inseminated herself seven times over the course of two years. The
first semen donor came to the house, and the six times following that the semen
came from Cryos International sperm bank in Denmark.
Because the mother wanted a girl, she forced A to use acidic
douches filled with vinegar, lime juice, or lemon juice and eat a “special
diet” because she thought it would help influence the baby’s gender.
Investigators believe A became pregnant for the first time
at age 14 but miscarried the baby. She again became pregnant at sixteen, with
she and her mother spreading the story that she had had a one night stand with
a boy and subsequently become pregnant.
She eventually gave birth to a baby boy, and shortly
afterwards midwives became concerned by the mother’s interactions with A. They
called her “pushy and insensitive,” and recalled her attempts at preventing
breastfeeding because she didn’t want “any of that attachment thing.”
The midwives eventually alerted child protection when they
noticed the daughter’s reluctance to give the baby over to her mother. Over the
previous few years, social services had been alerted four times over concern
for the children’s welfare, but no immediate concerns were found.
This case has brought to light several issues that the
British government is working to solve, including the requirements for
attaining donor sperm through Cyros and home schooling laws. The mother had
kept her children in extreme isolation for several years, and they had not even
seen their adoptive father for a decade.
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